Public Radio For Eastern North Carolina 89.3 WTEB New Bern 88.5 WZNB New Bern 91.5 WBJD Atlantic Beach 90.3 WKNS Kinston 88.5 WHYC Swan Quarter 89.9 W210CF Greenville
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
US

The Planet Money Mission Patch

Photographed by Annabel Edwards
/
Designed by Ryan Troy Ford

Going to space used to be the playground of governments, but now rockets and satellites are becoming so small and so cheap that even a podcast can launch a space mission. So that's just what Planet Money did!

When NASA or SpaceX launch a mission, they commemorate the occasion with a patch. For our journey into orbit, the Planet Money patch is packed with symbolism from our mission: the Planet Money mascot (an astronaut) meets our cube satellite (affectionately named "Pod-1," or "Poddy" for short) and there's the intrepid squirrel from the originalPlanet Money t-shirt (inspired by Keynes' "Animal Spirits"). Each star represents one of Planet Money's staff and, as mentioned in the podcast, we inscribed a Latin motto on Pod-1: "Per Ardua ad Astra," or "Through Difficulty to the Stars," the personal motto of one of our reporters.

Listen to the podcast episodes here.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

US
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
Elizabeth Kulas is a producer on Planet Money. Before that, she produced shows at WNYC, Gimlet and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2016, she was part of the NPR team that reported on the Wells Fargo banking scandal. That reporting won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before falling in love with making audio, she studied Art History and German, with a focus on life in the former East Germany. She graduated from The University of Melbourne in her native Australia, with stints at Barnard College, New York and Berlin's Free University. Right now, she's entirely obsessed with space.